The Concert by Ismaíl Kadaré Page A

Chinese delegation in Mexico, led by the turban-wearing member of the Politbureau, the camera, as if trying to solve the enigma, dwelt for several seconds on the arrangement of the towel round his head.
    Such things had apparently so little to do with the late arrival of the freighters that the Albanian ministers concerned about these delays just shook their heads in bewilderment. Meanwhile, foreign press agencies announced that Mao Zedong was seriously ill, if not as dead as a doornail, and that the man who’d been seen at public receptions recently was merely one of his doubles. Some people even said Mao had been dead for ages, and everything that had been going on in China since then was the result of quarrels between two of his doubles, each claiming to be the great man himself.
    Some saw a connection between reports of Mao’s illness and the recent deterioration in Sino-Albanian relations, and hoped that when he, or one or both of the doubles, got better or died, the situation would be cleared up, things would go back to normal as they’d always done before, and this period would be no more than a disagreeable memory. And so that autumn, the delegations, though diminished, went on coming and going; for the first time in years, an invitation even went out to a delegation of writers. But any lingering optimism was roughly extinguished by a rumour to the effect that the Chinese ambassador had asked for an audience with the Albanian foreign secretary on the subject of an X-ray: if the matter at issue wasn’t actually a brawl, it was said to be the bruising of a Chinese foot by an Albanian one.
    Linda had a bath and then started to wander aimlessly around her apartment. Ever since breaking off the affair she’d had with a government television engineer the previous year, she’d found the afternoons terribly long. Now and again she would pick up a half-read book from the settee, but she soon threw it down again. Finding herself in the hall, she stopped and looked in the glass. Still undecided as to whether to go to the dressmaker’s for a fitting or call on one of her workmates at the Makina Import office, she started to do her hair.
    For some reason or other she couldn’t get out of her mind a poem she’d read a few days ago, waiting at the hairdresser’s:
    Ever since you left
I can feel myself gradually forgetting you,
Feel your eyes dying in me,
And your hair, and all
    She took out a hairpin and adjusted a couple of small combs. Forgetting someone’s hair, she thought as she fiddled with one of the combs. “I can never forget you,” he’d said in his last letter, his last attempt to revive their affair.- “I can never erase anything about you from my memory — your words, your eyes, your hair…” And yet, writing in that magazine, there was someone strong enough to say he
could 
forget. “Feel your eyes dying in me…and your hair.”
    People said that when you died it was your hair that died last, Linda smiled, in spite of the comb she was now holding in her mouth. Then she dropped it, put on her raincoat and opened the door, still not knowing where she was going.
    The late afternoon was still warm beneath the dull autumn sky, as if ignoring the seasons. Several times Linda almost went into a shop to buy some material, but each time she changed her mind. She felt relaxed and at ease with herself. For no particular reason, Suva’s words came back to her: “I got married during the blockade.” As a matter of fact, her thoughts had lately been turning more and more often to Silva and things connected with her. The surge of happiness she’d felt when she first met her, eight months ago, kept recurring. She now rejoiced in her good luck at working in the same office as Silva, and shuddered at the thought that one of them might be moved. Every so often she found herself adopting one of Suva’s expressions or gestures, and